Fairytale
by zenithoflife
Summary: Because he was the prince and she was the princess and even if it was just a little, they did love each other after all.


**Fairytale by Tsuris**

_We have always heard of the age old tale of Cinderella, worn old with constant retellings, and we always revel in the happy ending, __perhaps more so because there is a deep abiding wish that is hidden deep inside everyone of us, that yearns for a blissful finale after the trials and tribulations that pepper the tale and force to protagonists to go through. Because we know that in real life, things are not what they seem and there is never any happy ending. Well, to be painfully honest, there is no ending at all, because the story only goes on, and on, because it doesn't end merely when the couple gets married. But, what happens really, when the both of them get their happy ever after?_

_Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there lived a prince. He carried a glorious sword and rode a magnificent steed, searching, always searching the seven seas to find the perfect bride. Then one day, on a day of his return from yet another futile attempt to find his princess, his father decided to hold a banquet in order to find one for him. For after all, reasoned the old king, if his journeys over the lands and into the sea had all proved unsuccessful, why not choose a bride from within his ranks? It was easier, more convenient and most of all, cheaper. (The prince had made such a visible dent in the country's treasury with his excursions, that bankruptcy seemed imminent if he didn't do something rapidly.) _

_So, he had his g__rand chancellor arrange a party, one that would be the finest, the most lavish and the grandest celebration ever seen, and under the pretext of welcoming his heir back home, he invited all the highborn beautiful women of nobility to grace the occasion. And if the prince accidentally fell in love with one of them, well, where was the harm in that?_

_-----------_

So things fell out as they were; he belonged to the upper echelon of society, the only offspring to a pair of immensely wealthy doctors, and she was a student depending on the school's loans to pay her bills. She scrimped and saved every penny from her waitressing job to pay for her meals, whilst he spent money like water, using them as extravagent gifts to tease, taunting the girls that flocked to him. He was always looking, looking for his next unsuspecting victim even when he had three of them draped around him. But then again, he could never be satisfied with what he had, always chasing the next star in the horizon; indifferently leaving anyone of his previous conquests, battered and broken on the shore in his wake. He was everything she loathed, and she was everything he craved for—how could such a mismatched couple ever come together?

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_But on the day of the party, he __loitered around the balcony, skulking in the dark shadows that defined him as he concealed himself from the multitude of people who were practically offering their daughters to him on a silver platter. If he was a better man, he would have perhaps chosen one of them, to maintain the purity of his bloodline, and to honour his father's wishes—but he wasn't, couldn't and wouldn't, and thus was caught captivated as she glided into the doors and diverted all the attention of the other men in the room. _

_-------_

After this, every time he thought about the vagaries of life that had brought them together, he could almost see the mockery in this. He, the hunter, was caught neatly like an unwary prey as she drifted towards him and he strode towards her, a lithe lethal stalk casting an elegant shadow on the ground (although he hid the fact well that it was almost as if something was pulling him, that he was wrenched along by some unknown power, merely by the sight of her). It didn't matter that she was clad in a pair of faded jeans and her hair was pulled back messily with a barette. She looked utterly ravishing.

But she would smile bitterly when she thought about this later, an ironic quirk playing at the edges of her lips, because when he stalked towards her, ominous and oddly feline, an aggressive and incongruously hostile threat even in his posture; the predator had become the prey. It almost triggered the instinctive flight or fight response that howled for her to flee immediately, from this man with the fascinating hazel eyes. She was to rue the day she threw aside her doubts and stepped towards him.

He was a rich man's son, she was a waitress, and it didn't matter that they were arch enemies, or that she hated his guts, but he seduced her anyway with beautiful lies, weaving invisible traps of deception that trapped her in its midst, as she gazed spellbound at its splendid brilliancy of colour, until she was in too deep—unable to swim to shore and no one to save her from the radiance of the foam that lay like a unsuspecting blanket over its threatening waters. His suave air and debonair attitude muted the dangerous streak that lurked under its cover, hiding it from anyone's eyes.

In later days, he would wonder idly, whether it was the underlying dread that she would see through his charade and leave him too soon, far too soon, that urged the swiftness in which he demanded that they got married, or the wings that sped his feet as he strode towards the alter. Whatever it was, they were married, and no more questions asked.

_But love is not kind, and it is never the __way you want it to be. _And he couldn't help it when he found himself straying from his maritial vows, detachedly wondering if it was as easy as it was said to go astray, promising himself that it would be the first and last time. He ignored the bitter taste of his guilt crawling up the pit of his belly like a column of acrid smoke. And as, the sour tang of his sins played on his tongue, he noted absently to himself _so this is what betrayal tastes like_.

Because even if it was just a little, he did love her after all.

_But what he didn't know was that, once started, it was impossible to end, and the façade he put up __grew stronger and stronger as the days flew by. _

It was inevitable that she would find out, and it was in the little things he said and did. The looks he cast her on the sly to try to guess her emotions were no longer there, and their flames of their love banked through long years of neglect, and words that were left unsaid—until silence seemed to be their only way of communication. The embers and charred ashes were all that remained, as a solitary breath of smoke winded its way up the chimney, until the last meandering puff disappeared, melding into the sky until it was no longer visible in sight. And through layers of guilt and shame on his part, more than he cared to acknowledge, he managed to singlehandedly destroy any vestige of their love.

She grew afraid of his apathetic glances, the very ones that she laughed at when they first met. She wrote out long drafts of letters that he would never come to read and that were never sent in the first place, asking why—pleading with him to tell her all the reasons why their relationship had deteriorated to such an extent. But everytime she started on a new sheet, his uncaring aloof face would surface in her mind's eye, and the words—the very ones that she had come to depend on, the ones that never once failed her—would seem insignificant and simply not enough in the wake of their ruined marriage.

They would fall lifelessly and scatter, to be strewn carelessly by the road side, because it was only then, that she realised that what seemed to comprise of her world was not his—and what was so important to her, was only yet another happening in his life. She would come to understand that she never was and never would be any part of his past, present or future.

She felt like she was all thumbs, artlessly floundering her way blindly through the complex journey of love while all he had to do was to mold that art of love with his dexterous skilled fingers and she would fall at his feet. She worked the hardest for the relationship yet she felt herself seeming inept and incompetent in his eyes.

She wanted to tell him that it was too amateurish, that it didn't have to _be_ this way, but it was toolongtootiringtoofucking_scary, __because she was terrified of indifferent look in his eyes, that he actually didn't care and that their marriage had simply been a farce from the start. She could have probably been yet another one of the names of distant acquaintances in his phone, another woman that he discarded like leftover tissue. There were simply too many unspoken words clouding the air in between._

_She would never come to know the truth._

And it seemed that she could not live without him, and that without him, she would fall to the ground—lost in the mass of people, drifting and ambling through a meaningless life. She saw herself as a bird, with broken wings, unable to fly without him.

And on the day that she knew that he had an affair (his ever-changing girlfriend called him and she picked up the extension by accident.) She knew that the world as she knew it was slowly crumbling to dust. Buildings being razed to the ground mercilessly. Mocking laughter spiralling endlessly in the emptiness as darkness descended like a burgeoning dark cloak on the unsuspecting masses and their screams fading into oblivion. And it was then that she made up her mind.

_I'm sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I still love you. _The words fell like daggers on her heart, each one opening a deeper gash than the first. And she felt her unfaithful heart break anew as his words taunted and mocked her because she was powerless to stop the undulating wheels of Fate turning and the tragedy doomed to a fatal end unfolding before her troubled eyes.

---------------------

'Please sign the divorce papers, Mr Kurosaki,' the lawyer's voice chimes out. He looks at her with pain evident in his eyes, always so fathomless to her, yet it all seems different all of a sudden. Her heart aches at the _what could have been_s that lay between them, and she picks up her pen, until his voice breaks the silence that permeades the room. It was meant to be forceful, unwaveringly, assertive, yet it comes out as a mangled sob.

'Stop.'

_Stop._

_Ichigo__, _she thinks, _why now?_

Because it is not an order, it is not even a request—it is the closest he has come to begging—

_Stop._

She looks at him, her anguished glance conveying more than the words she had ever said.

_I don'__t love you._

_You don't love me too…right?_

She can see the muted plea in his eyes, the denial. One hand reaches involuntarily out to her, until the look in her eyes freezes its motion in the air, before it has barely crossed the threshold of his jacket.

_Please, _she thinks, _please don't tell me to stay. Because then, I just—just might not have the heart to go._

And whether it is divine intervention or because he understands her too well, always and forever, his hand falls back limply to his side.

And she looks into his tortured brown eyes, and signs the paper. And it is only then that he realises how much he really, truly loves her.

_Then she flew, realising that he was the only thing which kept her from flight._

_--------------_

_Once upon a time, in a kingdom far far away, there lived a prince. Not a common prince at that, __but he was neither handsome nor ugly. Neither fat nor thin. He carried no sword and rode no horse. The only thing that he had in common with the princes of lore, was that he was unbelievably, incredibly and exceedingly rich. He had everything, and yet nothing at all—because he lacked the most fundamental, the most important thing in the world, a heart. _

_And he met a girl, definitely not a princess—she defeated all social conventions that defined her as a princess—but he married her anyway. But the world is not a happy place, and this is not a happy tale, but they tried to live happily ever after._

_But the prince who kept trying to look for love, was in actual fact terrified of it. What if she loved someone else, what if she hurt him, what if… The what ifs were too many, too numerous that he__ tried his best to deny their love—and forgot that the what ifs were painful, but the what could have beens were agonizing. Because you have to open your heart, before you could love someone to the fullest. And he because he was too busy looking for ways to prove that he was not—definitely not—in love that he somehow managed to miss the fact that love was right before him, if he would merely open his eyes and look. And the day he found out that his one soul mate was right before him, was the day that she left._

He never married again, and she never forgave him, more because he never asked for her forgiveness then anything else. But then again, she never expected him to.

_**But ten years later, when he died, despite the fact that they were on two different sides of the world, he begged God to let him meet her again. **_

_**And **__**that very night, she went to join him. Because in the end, he was the prince and she was the princess and even if it was just a little, she did love him after all.**_


End file.
